News Articles | July 24, 2022
We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming. And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction.
The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million people in the United States are under heat alerts in more than two dozen states from temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s. Wildfires have destroyed thousands of acres in California. More than 73 percent of New Mexico is suffering from an “extreme” or “severe” drought. Thousands of people had to flee from a fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park on Saturday and 2,000 homes and businesses lost power.
The United States Constitution is failing: Its anti-democratic structures are creating a crisis of legitimacy and an inability to address a cascade of social crises. This is a problem endemic to liberal democracies, as the contradictions between political democracy on the one hand, and the tyranny of capital and ruling class control of politics on the other become heightened.
Part of the crisis we face is the disjuncture between the sense of horror and urgency from the events of the last months and the gross inaction from politicians, particularly Democrats. Less than two weeks after a white supremacist attack on Black shoppers in Buffalo, New York, another gunman murdered children and their teachers in a school in Uvalde, Texas.
In the same month as these mass murders, a leaked Supreme Court decision from an abortion case in Mississippi threatened to undo 50 years of legal precedent and end the right to abortion. As June drew to a close, what many had once considered an impossibility happened as Roe v. Wade was officially overturned. The decision was all the more jarring for its disregard of the health of millions who can become pregnant and the basic right to decide one’s own future.
y personal experience of this week’s “heat apocalypse” in Europe involved discovering large globs of hot, sticky tar stuck to my leg after I trod in melted asphalt on a mountain road in France on Sunday afternoon: The road that I was walking on had literally begun to melt.
I was standing on the melted road because the heat was so extreme that my car’s engine had overheated, and my kids and I ended up stranded on top of a steep mountain pass in the Pyrenees until a tow truck finally came to tow us down the mountain to a nearby town. Around the continent, roadside assistance agencies predicted spikes in the number of car breakdowns as the thermometer readings headed north.
Meanwhile, others across Europe were facing much more frightening emergencies as fires engulfed swathes of forest in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary and France, and as the extreme heat triggered housefires and wildfires in and around London. Europe is finally waking to the ghastly realities of the climate crisis and the rampant fires that come with it.
Thousands of emergency workers in California struggled to fight a rapidly growing wildfire near Yosemite National Park on Sunday as President Joe Biden continued to mull whether to declare a national climate emergency, a move that campaigners say is needed to respond to the immediate threat of extreme weather and lay the groundwork for a livable future.
Dubbed the Oak Fire, the California blaze was completely uncontained as of Sunday afternoon, having tripled in size since it began on Friday. The fire has now burned more than 14,000 acres, making it California's largest wildfire of the season.
"Explosive fire behavior is challenging firefighters," Cal Fire said in a statement Saturday, characterizing the blaze as "extreme with frequent runs, spot fires, and group torching." Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for Mariposa County on Saturday as authorities urged thousands in the potential path of the fire to evacuate immediately.
Climate scientists have long warned that drought, extreme heat, and other conditions driven by planetary warming could make wildfires more frequent and intense. A United Nations report published earlier this year raised the specter of an ever-worsening "global wildfire crisis" if governments across the globe—particularly the rich nations most responsible for carbon emissions—don't radically alter their energy policies and phase out fossil fuel use.
The last time prices rose this fast was 41 years ago. The last time the UK got through prime ministers this fast was the mid-1970s. The last time there was open war between major European powers was in 1945. The last time the Northern Hemisphere was this hot was probably 125,000 years ago.
Yet the FTSE 100 is worth more than ever, corporate profits are higher than ever, there are more British billionaires than ever. And oil companies are richer than ever.
If we took climate change seriously, the petroleum industry would be bankrupt. These firms borrow billions against the future value of reserves they are yet to drill, but atmospheric physics demands we can’t burn that carbon if we wish civilization to survive.
f our modern societies are to continue to exist in recognizable form, oil companies’ assets are worthless. And if we aren’t, they are still worthless.
But in reality, fossil fuel giants are doing better than ever. Last week, Shell said it expected to revise upwards the value of oil and gas assets it had previously written down, causing its share prices to leap for joy.
Saudi Arabia, which has struggled for investment ever since it allegedly hung a bunch of businessmen by their feet and beat them until they coughed up their bank details, has been welcomed in from the cold.
These sorts of events are directly responsible for sea level rise and coastal flooding around the world and in the United States (which has a lot of coast if you think about it). Often it is the poorest and most disadvantaged who will suffer most severely from disruptions like storm surges, coastal erosion, salt water invasion of lagoons, and urban flooding.
A heat wave in Greenland only makes it about 60 degrees F. (15C), when most of us would still feel the need for a sweater. But ordinarily, according to a climate and weather site, “In July the average maximum daytime temperatures are cold and range from 6°C (43°F) in KapTobin to 10°C (50°F) in Angmagssalik. Nighttime temperatures generally drop to 2°C (36°F) in Angmagssalik and 0°C (32°F) in KapTobin. It is one of the warmest months of the year.”
So, yeah, 60F/ 15C is a stretch.
Newly released images from NASA show how drastically decades of drought in the American West have caused water levels in crucial Lake Mead to decline, threatening water access for tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland.
NASA Earth Observatory released satellite images of the reservoir, part of the Colorado River watershed, taken in early July 2000, 2021, and 2022.
The most recent image, taken on July 3, shows a so-called "bathtub ring" around the shoreline of the lake—mineralized areas which were formerly underwater.
The Overton Arm section of the reservoir has lost considerable water since 2000, while the northern portion of Lake Mead appears significantly dried-out, even compared to one year ago.
Firefighters don’t normally allude to early English epics, but in a briefing on the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico, a top field chief said, “It’s like Beowulf: it’s not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear.” He meant that the flames you face may be terrifying, but scarier yet are the conditions that spawned them, perhaps enabling new flames to erupt behind you with no escape possible. The lesson is a good one and can be taken further. If tinder-dry forests and high winds are the mother of the thing we fear, then climate change is the grandmother.
The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire blazed across 534 square miles of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost extension of the Rockies. Although the fire was the largest in New Mexico’s history, it had competition even as it burned. This spring, the Black Fire, a megafire of nearly equal size, devoured forests in the southern part of the state. The combined area of the two fires is roughly equal to that of Rhode Island, the American standard for landscape disasters on a colossal scale.
Coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin’s decision to block his own party’s clean energy program represents a huge setback in the fight against climate breakdown. It is even more dramatic considering that the U.S. is the only major economy in the world without a national climate policy. Of course, this sad state of affairs is not merely due to the likes of Manchin, but to the overall reactionary nature of the country’s political and economic landscape, as Noam Chomsky highlights in this exclusive interview for Truthout. Indeed, the dark forces at work in the contemporary United States are so powerful that they can stifle reform even when the future of the planet is at stake. But Chomsky argues that, as in the past, organized activism — engagement on the ground — can offer a way out even from the most exceedingly onerous conditions.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the worlds most cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C. J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).
The International Union for Conservation of Nature on Thursday formally listed the beloved migratory monarch butterfly as endangered, citing dire threats to the subspecies posed by the climate crisis, deforestation, pesticide use, and logging.
Dr. Bruno Oberle, the director-general of IUCN—the world's leading scientific authority on species conservation—said the new listing "highlights the fragility of nature's wonders, such as the unique spectacle of monarch butterflies migrating across thousands of kilometers," a reference to the insects' remarkable biannual journey across North America.
"To preserve the rich diversity of nature, we need effective, fairly governed protected and conserved areas, alongside decisive action to tackle climate change and restore ecosystems," Oberle added. "In turn, conserving biodiversity supports communities by providing essential services such as food, water, and sustainable jobs."
The population of monarch butterflies in North America has been falling rapidly in recent years, a decline largely unabated by government action to protect the imperiled insects or to fight the climate crisis that is pushing them to the brink of extinction.
For decades in Houston, where resident Bryan “Lucas” Parras grew up near the city’s shipping channel, neighborhoods have faced the cumulative impacts of toxic emissions. The area is crammed with industrial facilities, chemical plants and oil refineries. Pollution has become such an ingrained part of life, Parras said, that residents on the city’s East End automatically adjust to the health threats: limiting time outdoors, filtering their water and making sure to carry their inhalers in case of asthma attacks.
“A lot of the pollution in Houston has just become normalized because there’s so much and because so little has been done,” said Parras, 45, and a co-founder of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services. The group, known as t.e.j.a.s., for years has advocated on behalf of impacted neighborhoods by providing residents with tools to protect themselves and the environment.
As I sat down to write this on Thursday afternoon, more than 100 million Americans were sweltering under extreme heat warnings and that didn’t include the Pacific Northwest, where the vents of the blast furnace are slated to open on Monday sparking temperatures in the 100s for most of next week. (It’s a modest 87 at the moment here in Oregon City.)
Meanwhile, this week the tarmac on the runways at London’s Heathrow Airport melted, after the temperature soared to 104F. (It had never been 100F there before at any time.) Fires burned across England, France, Portugal and Spain. The surface soil temperature in Spain spiked to 138F. People died on the streets, in their cars, on their bikes, in prisons and nursing homes. Europe’s response to this crisis is to restart shuttered coal plants.
It’s raining where’s it’s never rained before. Ice frozen 10,000 years ago is melting into milky streams. Rivers that have run for 1,500 years are now seasonal creeks. 1,000-year floods are happening every 30 years. Forests are burning beyond their capacity to regenerate, while deserts are expanding in all directions. Alpine glaciers in the Alps and the Karakoram are collapsing. The cost of all is this enormous, hundreds of billions a year in the US alone. But one community’s catastrophe is another’s financial opportunity. Many of the same corporations driving the climate crisis and are making out on the other end “restoring” the damage–often underwritten by government subsidies on both ends.
July 11 was World Population Day, an observance established by the United Nations aiming to highlight population issues, particularly how the human population relates to the environment. The UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) marked the occasion by releasing its World Population Prospects 2022 report, which announced that the global human population is on target to reach a new milestone: 8 billion people on the planet by November 15, 2022.
While this staggering figure should alarm even the most casual observer of the various environmental and health crises stemming from the overpopulation that is emblematic of the Anthropocene—like climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, food and water shortages, plastic pollution, air pollution, biodiversity loss, and the sixth extinction—the UN has advanced a false narrative, trumpeting the “story behind 8 billion and how we’ve got here… [as] a story of triumph,” saying that reaching this milestone is “a cause for celebration” with “infinite” possibilities for growth.
“We must celebrate a world of 8 billion people,” writes Dr. Bannet Ndyanabangi, the East and Southern Africa regional director for the UN Population Fund, the UN agency tasked with improving reproductive and maternal health. Others are picking up that upbeat messaging.
With a victory in Cleveland on Friday, Starbucks workers officially reached 200 union election wins across more than 30 U.S. states, a remarkable achievement in the face of a full-throttle union-busting campaign by the coffee company’s management and its billionaire interim CEO, Howard Schultz.
The speed with which Starbucks workers across the country built on the historic victory in Buffalo in December — when employees voted to form the company’s first-ever unionized store in the U.S. — has stunned observers who’ve seen the nation’s labor movement wither in recent decades amid a ruthless corporate assault.
“Across the country, Starbucks workers are striking against poor working conditions and the company’s open hostility to Starbucks Workers United’s nationwide union drive,” said Robert Reich, the former head of the U.S. Department of Labor. “In one year, 200 U.S. Starbucks stores have unionized. I’m amazed by what these courageous baristas have achieved.”
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in West Virginia v. EPA dismantles one of the last regulatory tools remaining to cut carbon emissions on a federal scale in the U.S. With the failure of the Democrats to pass significant legislation and the specter of looming defeats in midterm elections, it’s now up to progressive cities and states to take the lead in fighting the climate crisis.
We got close to breaking ground on such an alternative state-level strategy this year in New York. In May, the State Senate passed the Build Public Renewables Act. The bill mandates the state’s New Deal-era public power provider — the New York Power Authority (NYPA) — to generate all of its electricity from clean energy by 2030. It also sets up a process that would allow the New York Power Authority to build and own renewables while shutting down polluting infrastructure. Although it is the largest publicly owned utility in the country, with a track record of providing the most affordable energy in the state, the New York Power Authority cannot legally own or build new utility-scale renewable generation projects at present because the state limits the public power utility to owning only six large utility-scale projects of 25 megawatts or more. This is because renewable energy developers wanted to limit competition from the New York Power Authority. The Build Public Renewables Act would remove this restriction and unleash the New York Power Authority’s game-changing power.
Marking the 13-year anniversary of the last federal minimum wage increase in the U.S.—a meager boost from $5.15 to $7.25 in 2009—progressive campaigners on Sunday urged congressional Democrats to make another push to raise the national pay floor as inflation continues to diminish workers' purchasing power.
"Today is a sad anniversary in the United States," said Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group that advocates progressive economic policy. "For 13 years now, Congress has failed to act to raise the $7.25 hourly federal minimum wage. Lawmakers have turned their backs on America's tens of millions of low-wage workers and revealed themselves to be beholden to the short-sighted interests of some of their ultra-rich donors."
According to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the real value of the federal minimum wage is currently at its lowest point in nearly seven decades amid record-high inflation, which spurred a decrease in real average hourly earnings between June 2021 and June 2022 as corporate profits soared.
A Sacramento judge ruled Friday that an initiative to raise California's minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025 cannot appear on the state's ballot this coming November, even though the campaign behind the proposal obtained more than enough signatures.
Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James Arguelles' ruling stems from a dispute between the Living Wage Act campaign and the office of California's Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who said county officials didn't verify a sufficient number of signatures in time.
As Cal Matters reported Friday, "The minimum wage campaign argued that Weber's office confused county election officials because she told them they had until July 13 to finish the count, based on the requirement that counties get 30 working days for signature verification after campaigns turn in their petitions."
"Proponents collected 1 million signatures, but didn't turn in signatures until May, Weber’s office said, making them late to start the clock," the outlet explained. "By the June 30 deadline to qualify for this November's ballot, several counties had not finished verifying signatures and the campaign fell short."
Joe Biden’s administration is in crisis.
The president’s approval rating has hit record lows, with some polls eclipsing the dismal support for his predecessors Barack Obama and Donald Trump. When it comes to the economy, which encompasses voters’ top-ranked concern, Biden’s approval stands at just 30 percent. As inflation continues to hit Americans in the pocketbook, especially high energy and food prices, a majority now say they believe the economy will get worse over the coming year — and expect a recession. Nearly 80 percent of respondents in a recent New York Times survey say the country is heading in the wrong direction, while 64 percent of Democrats want someone else to be the party’s nominee in 2024. In sum, the American public is handing down a harsh referendum on Biden’s leadership.
What’s behind these dire numbers? First off, the president’s agenda that voters elected him to enact — from curbing climate change to expanding childcare, guaranteeing paid family leave, and taxing the rich — remains stalled in Congress, facing stiff opposition from conservative Democrats. Other campaign promises that Biden could fulfill through executive action, like canceling student debt, haven’t been acted upon.
Government watchdogs on Friday warned that a plan by former President Donald Trump to drastically remake the federal workforce should he win the presidency in 2024 would "utterly destroy" public service in the United States.
As Axios reported Friday, central to Trump's plans for a second term is the reinstatement of his executive order known as "Schedule F," which established a new category of federal employees.
Under the executive order, which Trump signed just days before losing the 2020 election, thousands of federal workers who have served under presidents from both major political parties could be reclassified as "Schedule F" employees, eliminating their employment protections.
Trump could purge as many as 50,000 members of the nonpartisan workforce who he deems to have influence over policy decisions, leaving them with no recourse, and fill their jobs with "loyalists to him and his 'America First' ideology," according to sources who spoke to Axios.
The World Trade Organization's complete failure on Friday to lift intellectual property barriers that have hindered vaccine and treatment access throughout the Covid-19 pandemic led nearly 300 civil society groups from across the globe—including Zambia, India, Bolivia, and Brazil—to call on governments to "outright defy" WTO patent rules if necessary to combat the still-spreading virus.
"A few wealthy countries promoting pharmaceutical corporation interests have been able to block the use of the WTO's waiver mechanism to temporarily suspend such barriers despite more than 100 WTO member countries supporting a waiver," the organizations said in a joint statement Friday. "This outrageous situation underscores that governments must take immediate actions to bypass the WTO’s prioritization of pharmaceutical monopolies over human lives."
The patent agreement that the WTO adopted in Geneva on Friday merely clarifies existing governmental authorities to ramp up vaccine production through compulsory licensing and eases some export restrictions, changes that are unlikely to do much to expand access in developing countries.
The World Trade Organization's 12th Ministerial Conference ended Friday with an agreement on patent rights that campaigners said would do virtually nothing to address vast global inequities in coronavirus vaccine and treatment access, a failure they attributed to relentless obstruction by rich countries and the pharmaceutical industry.
Reached after marathon negotiations, the narrow deal clarifies governments' ability to use compulsory licensing to ramp up vaccine production without the consent of patent-holding pharmaceutical companies. The agreement also temporarily eases restrictions on the export of vaccines produced under compulsory licenses.
The final text, which is set to remain in effect for a period of five years, drew furious responses from public health advocates who slammed the deal as a product of a fundamentally unequal process that saw rich nations—acting on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry—dictate the outcome with minimal regard for developing countries. One conference attendee, Anna Marriott of Oxfam International, said she heard that some national delegations did not even get a chance to see the text before it was adopted by the WTO.
It feels like we can’t go a single week without hearing about the re-emergence, or emergence of a disease or ailment at the moment.
We’ve had a mysterious outbreak of hepatitis among children, a rise in “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome”, and the UK Government declaring a ‘national incident’ after allegedly discovering the polio virus in England.
And now, the Director General of the World Health Organization has overruled the World Health Organization to single-handedly declare the alleged monkeypox outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
All of these outbreaks follow an alleged Covid-19 pandemic, and all of them are “coincidentally” occurring after millions of people worldwide have been injected with an experimental mRNA Covid-19 vaccine.
But this is precisely why we shouldn’t really be that surprised. Because all we’re witnessing is the consequences of the damage done to millions of immune systems around the world by these experimental vaccines.
Since around the middle of May 2022, you will have most likely heard or seen the word Monkeypox mentioned numerous times in the mainstream media.
If you haven’t then you’re about to.
This is because on Saturday 23rd July 2022, the Director General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros, overruled the World Health Organization to single-handedly declare the alleged monkeypox outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. (Source)
Allegedly, for the first time since its discovery among humans in Africa over 50 years ago, the monkeypox virus is circulating throughout several countries including the USA, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and most of Europe all at the same time.
But it just so happens that every single country where monkeypox is allegedly circulating is also a country that has distributed the Pfizer Covid-19 injection to its population; excluding some countries in Africa where the disease has been endemic for the past 50 or so years.
The World Health Organization has not received a single report of monkeypox from any country in the world where the Pfizer vaccine was not administered.
Why is this?
We previously published an article describing the shocking revelation that 82% – 97% of women either suffered a miscarriage or suffered the loss of their newborn child following Covid injections according to documents the US Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) reviewed BEFORE issuing emergency use authorisation for Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid “vaccine.”
According to the documents Pfizer submitted in their request for FDA approval, of the 270 pregnant women who had an injection, “no outcome was provided for 238 of the pregnancies.” In other words, Pfizer had no idea what happened in 238 of the pregnancies. Of the 29 known outcomes, Pfizer noted that only 1 was “normal” and 28 resulted in the death of the baby. That means 97% of all known outcomes of Covid “vaccination” during pregnancy resulted in the loss of a child.
Dr. Byram Bridle, an Associate Professor of Viral Immunology in the Department of Pathobiology at the University of Guelph, Canada – who wants to help his fellow scientists in making sure that this science gets widely distributed throughout the world – wrote his assessment of these shocking revelations in an article.
“This is for the sake of ‘fully informed consent’, something that regulatory agencies, public health officials and too many physicians seem to have abandoned over the past couple of years,” he wrote.
Sometimes a single precipitating event may play a crucial role in the collapse of a decaying empire.
Such was the case with the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. The sudden accidental meltdown and explosion of one of the USSR’s most advanced nuclear reactors produced a large-scale release of radiation across Europe. The catastrophe was regarded as devastating proof of the terrible decrepitude of the Soviet system, and became one of the biggest stories of the closing decades of the twentieth century.
Indeed, writing on Chernobyl’s twentieth anniversary in 2006, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev even suggested that the disaster “was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Probably Soviet Communism would have eventually fallen regardless, but Chernobyl may have greatly accelerated the process, and the next few years saw the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the exodus of the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, and soon afterwards, the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.
Yet although Chernobyl may have ranked as the worst nuclear disaster in history and its political consequences were immense, the comprehensive 33,000 word Wikipedia account reveals that the actual statistics were far from overwhelming. Two engineers died in the initial explosion and two more were badly burned. Another 134 members of the staff were hospitalized with acute radiation syndrome, and 28 of these died in the months that followed, along with an additional 14 suspected deaths over a decade.
Hundreds of people affected by the United States' sky-high insulin prices and more than two dozen progressive advocacy groups on Monday told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that it would be an "enormous mistake" to exclude insulin-related provisions from an emerging reconciliation bill.
The initially far-reaching but now heavily curtailed economic package that congressional Democrats hope to pass through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process before November's pivotal midterms is expected to focus on lowering drug prices—the one major reform that right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) has agreed to in his negotiations with Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Earlier this month, Senate Democrats—including Manchin, whose vote is indispensable in the evenly split upper chamber—reached a deal on a plan that would allow Medicare Part D to negotiate the prices of up to 20 prescription medications directly with pharmaceutical corporations, a proposal that is overwhelmingly popular with voters across party lines.
The Biden administration on Friday announced an investigation into how the city of Houston, Texas responds to reports of illegal dumping of everything from trash to human remains in communities of color.
Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), said in a Friday speech that the probe will determine whether the city complies with the Title VI nondiscrimination requirements of the Civil Rights Acts.
"The investigation is prompted by a complaint sent to the Justice Department from Lone Star Legal Aid," she explained. "The complaint alleges that the city of Houston engages in race and national origin discrimination against a predominately Black and Latino area in Northeast Houston."
Clarke said that the complaint claims residents of the area "frequently make calls complaining about the illegal dumping of household furniture, mattresses, tires, medical waste, trash, dead bodies, and vandalized ATM machines and other items dumped and abandoned in their community."
I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.
–Theodor Adorno 1959
DeSantis’s View of Education as Propaganda Factories
The crisis of education in the United States presents not only a danger to American democracy, but also the ideological and structural foundations for the emergence of a fascist state. The slide towards lawlessness and authoritarianism is now aided and abetted by educational policies that are repressive and dystopian, wedded to social control and the death of the social imagination. An unimagined catastrophe now characterizes how American education is being shaped by far-right Republican Party politicians. Nowhere is this more evident than in the policies of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who is on the forefront of transforming American education into a feral propaganda tool for producing and legitimating what is euphemistically called “patriotic education.” Coercion, conformity, and toxic forms of religious, political, and economic fundamentalisms now threaten to destroy education as a democratic public sphere, however weak it may be. Institutions of learning at all levels in the red states are becoming laboratories for what I term the Nazification of American education, replicating pedagogies of repression that were at work in Germany in the 1930s.
I shoulda quit you, long time ago
I shoulda quit you, long time ago
Then I wouldn’t be here
Down on this killing floor– Chester Burnett, aka Howlin’ Wolf, “Down on the Killing Floor”
Undelivered Goods
Imagine that you are in a buying club that has a big problem. You and your fellow club members fork over money to a “highly qualified” individual you and fellow club members have repeatedly voted into the position of district club manager. His job is to obtain and distribute items and services you need. He takes your money, votes, and time, promising that he can “deliver the goods.”
But he can’t really deliver, and he knows it. His pledge goes unfulfilled because a higher, 100-person club of structurally entrenched distributors refuse to deal seriously with him and most of the other 434 “district-level” club managers.” And those “higher ups” are opposed to you getting what you want and need.
Still, even as his failed promises pile up, your club manager comes back again and again demanding, sometimes begging more of your votes and money every two years. “The next purchasing cycle is going to be different,” he says. He “can’t make the case to the big shots above him without your votes and money,” he adds. And by the way, he says, you should try to use your votes and money to change the names and faces in the big club above him.
Statistics lie. Some lie more than others. The ones regarding unemployment lie brazenly and have done so for years, erasing the very existence of the long-term unemployed by simply deleting them from the regular tally. Statistics about homelessness lie. But they have an excuse: the homeless are hard to keep track of. So we’re told that roughly half a million Americans have no home. But that statistic is belied by one from the National Center on Family Homelessness, which says 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in America. Add those two numbers together and you get three million homeless Americans. But even that statistic probably undercounts the number of people sleeping in tents, cars, subways, cheap hotels, on friends’ couches or just out on concrete under the stars. So estimate, conservatively, that one percent of Americans are homeless. That percentage only moves in one direction: up.
As the average American single-family dwelling price stays stratospheric despite the cratering real estate market (one of the miracles of modern finance) and rents skyrocket, millions of people stare into the abyss of homelessness. “The cost of living is going up so quickly,” Johns Hopkins University professor Meredith Greif told the Washington Post July 3, “—through the price of gas and food and rent – that more people can’t afford a place to live anymore. Everywhere you turn, prices are rising, but wages aren’t keeping up.” If you think this is some fluke, some mistake, you need seriously to reconsider your take on our economy. The game is rigged, and it’s been rigged like this longer than you’ve been alive.
There aren’t a lot of journalists that Americans can look up to these days, especially in the mainstream media. Edward R. Murrow and his “boys” are long gone. Americans don’t have a Walter Cronkite to set their minds at ease. Even the venerable 60 Minutes has had a carousel of unremarkable talking heads since the retirements of Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Harry Reasoner.
Instead, many (most, maybe?) Americans get their news from “news” channels that fall under the auspices of their networks’ entertainment divisions. They get their news from the likes of Ken Dilanian, the NBC News and MSNBC intelligence journalist who in 2014 was exposed sending his stories to the C.I.A. for comment and clearance before he sent them to his own editor. (In one email exchange, a new C.I.A. public affairs flack wrote, “I am looking forward to working with you, Ken!” Dilanian replied, “Hooray! Glad to have you guys.”
That’s what makes a new book by Nat Parry so welcome. American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader, is a compendium of the most impactful and important pieces of investigative journalism published by Nat Parry’s father Robert, the eminent reporter from the Associated Press, Newsweek, and PBS, and the founder of Consortium News.
American officials are starting to admit Washington’s lies about Iran. William Burns, director of the CIA, said on Wednesday, July 20, that Iran has never resumed its nuclear weapons production program since it was interrupted, in 2004. The statement only confirms the suspicion of several analysts around the world, but it is truly impressive that it came from the head of American intelligence. Indeed, it reveals that Washington really bases its interventionist foreign policy on lies and distortions.
During his speech at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Director Burns stated:
“Our best intelligence judgment is that the Iranians have not resumed the weaponization effort that they had underway up until 2004 and then suspended, so that’s something, obviously we at CIA and across the US intelligence community keep a very, very sharp focus on”.
Earlier, in December of last year, the Director had already stated something similar to these lines, indicating that there were insufficient reasons for the US to believe that Iran planned to produce nuclear weapons. However, on neither occasion did Burns clarify why the US government had repeatedly mentioned this hypothesis of resuming the program in recent years, even without any scientific basis to justify the narrative.
Interestingly, it was not just Burns who recently commented on this topic. Tamir Hayman, director of Israeli intelligence, has already stated that Tel Aviv has not found evidence that Tehran plans to develop nuclear weapons, despite the fact that there is a large process of uranium enrichment.
It is important to focus on the history of experimental vaccines.
This article reviews the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Macon County, Alabama that began in 1932 as well as other US government experiments that infected sick and vulnerable people with syphilis and other deadly diseases applied in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948.
In Macon County, Alabama, the U.S. government monitored more than 600 black sharecroppers including 399 who were already infected with syphilis while the remaining 201 who were not.
Many people of color in the U.S. do not trust the medical establishment because of this troubling history of human experimentations.
According to CNN who was there to witness the historical moment of the first Covid-19 vaccine given to a black woman but in reality, it was propaganda for Big Pharma
“A critical care nurse was the first person in New York and among the first people in the United States to get a shot of the coronavirus vaccine authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration.”
Two of America’s top health agencies are reportedly hemorrhaging staff as poor decision-making, described by staff as ‘bad science,’ has led to low morale.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are both suffering staff shortages, according to Dr. Marty Makary, a top public-health expert at Johns Hopkins University, writes at Common Sense, the Substack run by former New York Times columnist, Bari Weiss.
Major decisions made by the agencies that hurt morale included support for masking in schools, school closures during the pandemic and the authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for children four and under.
Both agencies, along with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been mired in controversy throughout the pandemic for inconsistent messaging and for decision-making that didn’t seem to line up with available science.
‘They have no leadership right now. Suddenly, there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,’ an anonymous NIH scientist told Common Sense.
Schools became a battleground of the COVID-19 pandemic in America.
This year marks exactly 50 years since the establishment of ties between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. US President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972 and initiated an unprecedented thaw in relations, the first ever between a Communist power and a leading capitalist one. It was a very unusual occurrence, especially as the (First) Cold War was reaching its zenith precisely at that time. Although Mao Zedong himself and Nixon paved the way for the establishment of this relationship, it was only after Deng Xiaoping took power that the modern Sino-American relationship grew and in many ways shaped the economic and geopolitical realities of our time.
At the time, China was still recovering from the last 200 years of decline which pushed probably the most powerful country in human history to the verge of collapse. This was followed by what can only be described as a semi-colonial status, culminating in the 1930s and 1940s, when Japan used China’s weakness to occupy large swathes of Chinese land, often taking areas of utmost economic importance.
It was only with the establishment of the PRC in 1949 that this chaos ended, with extensive and crucial help coming from the USSR. By the 1980s, China became stable enough, but was still nowhere near its full potential. Deng Xiaoping focused almost entirely on the economy, realizing it was essential for China’s full recovery and return to great power status.
China, the world’s most populous country, offered the largest labor force on the planet, which (by American standards) was also cheap, making it the perfect choice for outsourcing entire sectors of the US economy, especially its industrial production. Although the Sino-American relationship went through a serious crisis in the 1990s, economic cooperation was booming and continued unabated into the 2000s. However, in recent years, this relationship has become burdened with geopolitical rivalry, particularly coming from the US, which has started meddling more aggressively in China’s internal affairs, especially the issue of Taiwan.
“There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick
Nothing is private.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.
Nothing that was once private is protected.
We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.
AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.
The US financial sector has long looted other countries. A number of participants have described the process. First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid. Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population. Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan. Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.
As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation. It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy. If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.
Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary. The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions. Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.
We are dangerously close to a situation where ~ if the American people took to the streets in righteous indignation or if there were another 9/11 ~ a mechanism for martial law could be quickly implemented and carried out under REX 84.
The Cheney/Bush administration has a plan which would accommodate the detention of large numbers of American citizens during times of emergency.
The plan is called REX 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984. Through Rex-84 an undisclosed number of concentration camps were set in operation throughout the United States, for internment of dissidents and others potentially harmful to the state.
The Rex 84 Program was originally established on the reasoning that if a “mass exodus” of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA.
Existence of the Rex 84 plan was first revealed during the Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987, and subsequently reported by the Miami Herald on July 5, 1987
” These camps are to be operated by FEMA should martial law need to be implemented in the United States and all it would take is a presidential signature on a proclamation and the attorney general’s signature on a warrant to which a list of names is attached.”
And there you have it ~ the real purpose of FEMA is to not only protect the government but to be its principal vehicle for martial law.
This is why FEMA could not respond immediately to the Hurricane Katrina disaster ~ humanitarian efforts were no longer part of its job description under the Department of Homeland Security.
Democrats in Congress and their globalist billionaire backers are lobbying the Biden Administration to deploy hundreds of billions of dollars into the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The initiative is being advertised to “save Ukraine” and impoverished nations, but it acts as an instrument to further centralize monetary power.
In a letter this week that was signed by almost 50 democrat members of Congress, the politicians pressed the Biden Administration to infuse the IMF with $650 billion worth of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), bringing the international institution an enormous amount of capital to increase its lending and borrowing capacity.
Last year, citing the economic pain caused by their own COVID policies, Congress passed a bill resulting in the IMF approving a $650 billion SDR package. Now, it is being rebranded to “help Ukraine.” According to the letter, Biden can approve an additional $650 billion in liquidity without any new legislation from Congress. With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden can instruct the Treasury to send $650 billion into a black hole.
The legislators describe the proposed money creation as “a simple, rapid, and cost-free way to enable Ukraine, its neighboring allies, and developing countries to respond to, and build back better from, these combined international crises.”
Yes, they labeled it cost-free.
The Suicide Spectacular Summer Show, currently on screen across Europe, proceeds in full regalia, much to the astonishment of virtually the whole Global South: a trashy, woke Gotterdammerung remake, with Wagnerian grandeur replaced by twerking.
Decadent Roman Emperors at least exhibited some degree of pathos. Here we’re just faced by a toxic mix of hubris, abhorring mediocrity, delusion, crude ideological sheep-think and outright irrationality wallowing in white man’s burden racist/supremacist slush – all symptoms of a profound sickness of the soul.
To call it the Biden-von Der Leyen-Blinken West or so would be too reductionist: after all these are puny politico/functionaries merely parroting orders. This is a historical process: physical, psychic and moral cognitive degeneration embedded in NATOstan’s manifest desperation in trying to contain Eurasia, allowing occasional tragicomic sketches such as a NATO summit proclaiming Woke War against virtually the whole non-West.
So when President Putin addresses the collective West in front of Duma leaders and heads of political parties, it does feel like a comet striking an inert planet. It’s not even a case of “lost in translation”. “They” simply aren’t equipped to get it.
We delude ourselves at our own peril by wrongly believing that government policy makers and the captains of private finance and industry are older and wiser. Because these people have managed to reach the top of their game, we assume they possess the intellectual acumen to steer a nation past its economic and social ills. We falsely believe they have the comprehensive skills to tackle the dire challenges that lie ahead such as a warming planet, growing cultural divisions, and an economic system on the verge of total collapse. But as the years go by, more and more Americans are mounting questions with no realistic answers in sight. People feel we are charging blindly towards unaffordable energy costs, food insecurity, out-of-control debt and runaway inflation. We realize we can no longer rely upon our leading institutions and the mainstream media. Our politicians constantly voice promises that are never fulfilled.
We need to realize that the colonialist perspective, which has dominated American history since its founding, cannot be completely divorced from government efforts to manipulate and control factions within the population. A colonialist mindset can never offer constructive solutions to solve problems. Promoting common ground to simmer disharmony between seeming oppositional segments of society is counterintuitive to colonialism. Rather it must rely on instilling discord, conflict, and eventually violence, either psychological or physical, in order to keep conflicts alive, which in turn validate further control, surveillance and heavy-handed measures. Our nation’s leaders and institutions believe they are the adults in the room and we their children deserve their tough love.
In February 2021, by order of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine shut down three domestic television channels, accusing them of spreading Russian “propaganda.”
Three months later, Zelenksky arrested Viktor Medvedchuk, who was at the time leading the second-biggest party in Ukraine’s national parliament, the pro-Russia and Eurosceptic Opposition Platform for Life (OPZZh).
Zelensky didn’t have trouble incinerating vaunted democratic norms well-before Russia crossed the Rubicon into Ukraine this year. So it was no surprise when he did it again amid the war in late March, invoking emergency powers under martial law to nationalize TV channels and ban 11 opposition parties, including OPZZh — all supposedly done in the name of combatting Russian misinformation and Russian sympathizers, even though OPZZh’s then-chairman, Yuriy Boyko, denounced the war and called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.
Zelensky, however, wouldn’t miss another opportunity to clip the wings of political opposition in his country, certainly not now that Western media rationalizes and glorifies his every move.
The Ukrainian parliament has passed two new radical measures on labour liberalisation, prompting fears of Ukrainians losing workplace rights permanently as Russia’s war puts huge pressure on the country’s economy.
In two laws passed on Monday and Tuesday, MPs voted to legalise “zero-hours contracts” and made moves towards removing up to 70 percent of the country’s workforce from protections guaranteed by national labour law.
The latter measure means the national labour code no longer applies to employees of small- and medium-sized enterprises; instead, it is proposed that each worker strikes an individual labour agreement with their employer. It also removes the legal authority of trade unions to veto workplace dismissals.
Draft law 5371 had previously been criticised by the International Labor Organization, as well as Ukrainian and European trade unions, on the basis that it could “infringe international labour standards.”
Trade wars, crashing stocks, bond blowouts, global recessions, rapidly plunging corporate earnings, the start of firings, a global energy crisis, collapsing cryptos, sliding housing markets, Covid, monkeypox, worldwide quarantines, government-mandated job terminations over forced experimental vaccines, soaring inflation, worldwide shortages, multinational involvement in a hot European-Russian war, sanctions, record heat waves, widespread, droughts, brownouts, blackouts, and burnouts, famines, political riots on the US Capitol steps, riots on the steps of other capitals under revolt, and racial riots in the streets. How much can we take?
I know: Let’s also rapidly raise interest rates and drain money supply, going into a recession, and then follow Larry Summers’ latest advice and hit everyone with tax increases to punish the populace for inflation during such distressed times. Then let’s declare new stringent measures for the new pox upon us, which has just been declared by WHO another global health emergency. That ought to pretty well destroy the tatters that remain of the global economy and of human psyches in time for the planned Great Reset!
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A Blue Ocean Event occurs when virtually all sea ice disappears and the surface color changes from white (sea ice) to blue (ocean). According to many, a Blue Ocean Event starts once Arctic sea ice extent falls below 1 million km².
The image on the right shows a trend pointing at zero Arctic sea ice volume by September 2027.
Note that the volume data in the image are averages for the month September — the minimum for each year is even lower. Furthermore, since zero volume implies zero extent, this indicates that a Blue Ocean Event (extent below 1 million km²) could happen well before 2027.
Stories about protagonists who’ve been misguided their whole lives about something very important have been emerging in our culture for generations, and they continue to delight audiences in the box office to this day.
The pauper was really a prince. Luke was Darth Vader’s son. Keanu Reeves had been living in a computer simulation. Bruce Willis was really a ghost. Jim Carrey’s whole world was the set of a TV show, and everyone in his life had been lying to him since his infancy.
This theme repeats so often because it strongly resonates with people. And it strongly resonates with people because it’s exactly what is happening.
From our earliest moments we are trained to fit in with a society that was designed from the ground up by the powerful in the service of the powerful. As soon as we are old enough to get curious about the world and how it works our heads are filled with lies about such matters, by our education systems, by the media we consume, by our parents who were indoctrinated in the same way, and by the very culture we find ourselves immersed in from day one.
These stories about a character who’s been deceived about life resonate so strongly with us because on some level we all suspect it might be true of our own lives as well. They whisper to something hidden and sacred within us that has always sensed that there’s something not quite right with the way we are perceiving things.
Video: The Shocking Truth About the Global Depopulation Agenda
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” produced by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Children’s Health Defense, details the World Health Organization’s intentions to produce an anti-fertility vaccine in response to perceived overpopulation, and how such vaccines have been used — without people’s knowledge or consent — since the mid-’90s
The WHO has been caught more than once deliberately deceiving women into thinking they were vaccinated against tetanus, when in fact they were being sterilized
The film clearly illustrates the depopulation agenda is not a conspiracy theory. It’s reality, and it’s happening worldwide. The HPV vaccine and the COVID shots also have adverse impacts on fertility that are being ignored
In the decade after the rollout of the HPV vaccine, the teen pregnancy rate dropped by 50%
While VAERS is the only publicly available system to assess COVID jab injuries, the U.S. government has at least 10 other reporting systems they’re not sharing data from. Children’s Health Defense is filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the other systems to get a better idea of the scale of harms, but VAERS and anecdotal reports alone suggest the scale of injuries and deaths is enormous. Data from insurance companies around the world also confirm this
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In the interview above, Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Mary Holland, president and general counsel for Children’s Health Defense, discuss their new documentary film, “Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” which we published yesterday. If you missed it, you can watch it here.
Davos Elite to “Fundamentally Change the Way Food Is Produced and Consumed”
Funny how more and more we just keep hearing people around the world say, “I don’t remember voting for any of this, do you?”
In other related news, this year’s theme for the elite 2022 World Economic Forum just so happened to be, “Working Together, Restoring Trust”. Correct us if we’re wrong, but something wouldn’t need to be restored if it hadn’t been annihilated in the first place, now would it?
Source: Truthstream Media